Page:Harvey O'Higgins--Silent Sam and other stories.djvu/122

ll0 apprenticeship and the success in life that they had shared together.

But they had come to the Amphitheater from the circus-ring where Sutley had been little better than a "feeder" to the popular Burls; and now he was in a fair way to make Burls merely a feeder to the popular Sutley; for Burls was a "knockabout" clown, and his slap-stick art was in tone with a three-ring circus, but too loud for the theater; whereas Sutley merely translated the actions of life into terms of his own personality, expressing himself in a pantomime that was naturally comic just as the movements of beauty are naturally graceful, and he had "made a hit" in the Amphitheater after failing to make one in the circus tent. It was chiefly for this reason that Burls wished to return to the "big top"; and it was for this reason, too, that Sutley wished to remain on the stage.

"He don't know that I know why he's doin' it," Sutley explained to the girl. "An' I don't like to let on. He 's pretendin' it 's because he 'd sooner be out on the road—where we 'd make more money, he says, if we 'd sign a contrac' all together—you an' Pop, an' me an' him. I would n't like 'm to know I was playin' against him. But I don't want to go back to the circus, if I can help it."

Milly and he had stopped, on their way from the Amphitheater, to rest on a bench in Bryant Park, where the trees, in their new green, spread their leaves against the electric light with an artificial vividness and transparency of color that had the tone of a stage setting.